People accuse us old liberals of smarmy self-righteousness and God knows they are right. Four of us had lunch the other day and we agreed before we sat down: no politics. We know what we're going to say, so why say it? Self-righteousness is a good old American vice, and though it's preferable to cruelty and cynicism and deliberate dumbheadedness, nonetheless remind yourself: You are not so different from the others.

So when we got onto politics halfway through my tuna sandwich, I said a deliberately unself-righteous thing: "I don't think any of us believe what we say we believe. It's just our neurons responding to a phrase or something, a learned response that makes us feel warm for some reason that goes back to childhood. And in the end it doesn't matter. We're motes of dust on a tiny insignificant planet spinning around in a solar system so vast our minds can't comprehend it, and one day the planet will implode and all will be lost — Beethoven, Plato, Monet, the Minnesota Twins — and it won't make any difference to the cosmos whatsoever, so why should we care who wins the election in November?"

There was a moment of silence and then somebody said that Barack has a commanding lead in Wisconsin and that McCain is in deep mud in Ohio.

What I didn't get to talk about at lunch was my bath last week. Somehow the subject of cleanliness never came up. We covered children, gardens, travel, the Olympics (swimming was the closest we got to the subject).

My bath. (Thank you for asking.) I went to a Japanese spa and sat in a steam bath and after 20 minutes felt some of my liberal smugness trickle down my legs. Extreme heat breaks down moral arrogance — Look at equatorial peoples, do they lecture the rest of us about our duty to the environment? No, they don't — and I sat feeling more and more chastened. A stout Japanese woman poked her head in and led me into a tiled room and laid me out face-down on a padded table, then sloshed me with hot water from a basin and splorted some soap on my back and started scrubbing. She wore rough gloves for this. She rinsed me with pans of hot water and scrubbed some more.

My nakedness did not interest her. I suppose that repeated exposure to the male form will do that, just as plucking chickens might make you a vegan.

It was luxurious, being bathed, all the sploshing and skritching, but also humbling, a naked creature feeling scourged, the sheer ordinariness of it. Here you are, wet and naked, and you are not so different from any other wet naked person. And then came the tiny masseuse with the powerful thumbs, and the steam room again, and a shower, and out into the world I went, cleansed and twanged, somewhat chastened, my neurons trembling. "You look extremely clean," someone told me.

I think I still believe what I believe. Liberals hold that the test of a civilized society is how it deals with the weak, the sick, the powerless. As William Blake wrote:

A DOG STARV'D AT HIS MASTER'S GATE

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A HORSE MISUS'D UPON THE ROAD

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

Or as Jesus said, "Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these" and so forth. And so the test of the state is the state of the public schools and the treatment of the elderly, the ill, the demented, the incarcerated. And so the adoption of torture as American policy and loosing the darkness of the soul upon some poor manacled wretch at Guantanamo is no small matter. We are all wretches. But I will spare you the rest of the sermon.

Let's bring back community baths. I honestly think that if we all got together naked in a steamy room and got sploshed with hot water and scrubbed down hard, we would be more civil people. Cleaner, too.

Before the first debate, put the geezer and the skinny guy in a steam room for 30 minutes and see if it doesn't bring out something fine in them, something profound and memorable.

It's a great country, no matter what the rich and the privileged say, and the truth, dear hearts, is marching on.

Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" airs 6 to 8 p.m. Saturdays on KHPR FM 88.1 and 6 to 8 p.m Sundays on KIPO FM 89.3 His column appears Wednesday at honolulu advertiser.com/opinion and in Sunday's Focus section.